the OTTARAS collaboration (2015–)

In the autumn 2014 I was reading in the TARP festival in Vilnius and in the ZEBRA film poetry festival in Berlin. This was motivating for extending my project in the direction of sound poetry. Meeting the Russian composer Taras Mashtalir in e-Poetry2013 in London and later in Bergen, has resulted in a great collaboration. Together we are OTTARAS, and so far we have produced six sound poetry tracks based on my earlier works and with videos made by Alexander Vojjov and Yan Kalnberzin.

Next works are ‘sol’ and ‘bråten’, together with NAVN NOME NAME based on my book ‘telefonkatalogdiktet’ (phonebookpoem), published by Samlaget in 2006. The book is a collection of poetic family names in use in Norway today, presented as visual/concrete poetry. By creating this combination of names, shapes, music and reading, Norwegian names are transformed to international sound poetry. All works are produced in two versions: one for plain screening and one for performances.

Soundtracks are published on iTunes under the name OTTARAS: 3 CONCRETE. They have so far been performed in Norway, Russia and Canada.